“Writing a novel — actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs — is a tremendous pain in the ass”

Writing a novel – actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs – is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

Hand-coded in HTML5 and CSS3 on an Apple Macintosh using Sublime Text 2. Type set in Franklin Gothic and served by Typekit. Colophon embellishment (‘Manticore’) from The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents and Insects (1607) by Edward Topsell. Icons by IcoMoon.